Thursday, October 8, 2009

A Pakistani technician contracted H1N1 virus at work. He works in the same floor as I do, and he's currently recovering at home. News spread like wildfire and they asked everyone to leave that room, then they sprayed dettol everywhere on his desk and in the air. The air was literally saturated with this and it was nauseating. Everyone left early yesterday.

Today I came in, and saw employees of Khorafi (responsible for building maintenance) in the ground floor. However, there was something different about them: everyone was wearing paper masks!

I went to the my office at the 5th floor, and found out that the room that was used by the technical sealed. The two other people who work there are afraid to go in. They wore gloves and started spraying again. I told my boss that this is an unreasonable panic response. However he said we have "pregnant" women at work and they might be exposed. Furthermore, we're responisble for operating Kuwait electrical power grid. What would happen if operations were distrubed and led to a blackout, which can cause ecnomic collapse and further panic!! Zombies will definitely welcome this.

So what do we do?? what do we do?!! I told him that we need to nuke the office from orbit, it's the only way to be sure!!!

The big boss called in to ask about the affair of things, and asked my boss to purchase laser thermometers to check the temperature of employees. Then they printed out signs on how to avoid H1N1. For those of you who watched the popular 1980 movie "The Thing", I can only imagine my boss pacing back and fro to check everyone's temperature while they're strapped to chairs so that they don't escape and infect others when they get exposed! At least it's not a blood test!

Could she be our savior?

So there you go. Panic attack. However, you'd have to think if they didn't do anything, and someone for whatever reason contracted the virus, then you'll have MPs blaming the minister for not taking precautions. This might escalate to a grilling procedure and a vote of no confidence in the parliament, and the Kuwaiti government will collapse (again) and calls for reelection after dissolving the parliament!!!

If you think the above scenario is exaggerated, chances are you don't live in Kuwait. Enjoy! :)

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

While I was reviewing the 70 or so CVs today for candidates for a Linux administrator position we're currently recruting for our data center, I ran across this odd CV from Germany. Pay attention to "Career Objectives"

Notice the bit about "looking to make my hijrah from dar ul kufr." Hijrah means "migration", "dar ul kufr" is "land of the infidels", which obviously means Germany in this case. It took me 2 seconds to move his CV to the growing list of disqualified candidates. The name, which I erased, was a very typical German name (Think Wolfgang or Klaus!), so this is not some Turkish or Arab living in Germany, but an "indigenous" German if I can call him that, who apparently just converted to Islam or something.

What makes someone post something like this in their career objectives? Was he expecting sympathy from Arab/Muslim IT managers? Too bad it landed in the hands of a secular IT manager!